SaaStr

DECEMBER 13, 2022

Dear SaaStr: How Can You Tell iI Someone is Going To Be a Phenomenal CEO? Having now worked with a few dozen SaaS CEOs who are much better CEOs that I ever was, I think I can boil it down to 2 characteristics: They can see the future , and. They have the ability to recruit and build the teams to get there. The best founders, at least by the time they have 50–100 customers, can see at least several years into the future.

Revenue 322

Revenue SaaS Marketing 322

The Daily Egg

OCTOBER 16, 2022

Are your competitors outranking you? If they are, it’ll have a negative impact on your business, blog, or whatever kind of website. The post 7 Easy Steps to Improve SEO Ranking appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Business 352

Business 352

Predictable Revenue

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

Should marketing come before outbound sales? Here are 5 reasons why startups should nail down their marketing foundations before building a sales team. The post Why Start-Ups Should Nail Down Their Marketing Before Building a Sales Team appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Sales 317

Sales Marketing Startup Revenue 317

Trujay

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

In our world of heavy technology, customer feedback is present on many internet sites, but manual analysis is cumbersome and even impossible at times. Implementing an automated system to analyze this data is the difference between success and failure for many companies. How did our customers receive our product launch? Did they adapt to […]. The post 5 Ways to Use Customer Sentiment Analysis appeared first on Trujay: Migration & Integration Solutions.

Technology 92

Technology Data 92

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Unbounce

JANUARY 4, 2022

In marketing, colors are so much more than a HEX code. They can communicate as much as your copy—if you know what you’re doing. Imagine a banana-flavored candy wrapper without any yellow on it—the designer missed out on an important message, right? You might be able to read that the flavor’s banana, but you don’t know at first glance. 2021 brought us plenty of marketing trends to watch for in 2022, including color palettes to use in your marketing materials.

Trends 81

Trends Marketing Strategy Technical Review 81

Groove HQ

MARCH 3, 2022

We've pulled together a list of high quality customer support templates to help you level up your support game! The post 25 Customer Service Email Templates to Save the Day appeared first on Groove Blog.

Customer Support 103

Customer Support 103

Sujan Patel

MARCH 23, 2022

SaaS companies have grown at an incredible rate over the last few years. However, with the increased adoption of SaaS products, many have questioned if SaaS companies are sustainable. With no immediate business model and revenue models to support, the answers to this question vary, but all SaaS companies could learn from one another while […].

SaaS 70

SaaS Business Model Revenue Business 70

Chargify

APRIL 25, 2022

What Is Tiered Pricing? Tiered pricing is a subscription billing model which offers several plans at a fixed monthly price. These plans, or “tiers,” are. The post Tiered Pricing Examples for SaaS Businesses appeared first on Chargify.

Pricing 92

Pricing Business SaaS Payment Features 92

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 9, 2022

In 2020, revenue growth was the most important factor explaining a public software company’s forward multiple. The formula has changed since then. Net income has surged to the highest correlate of a public software company’s multiple surpassing revenue growth. Narratives published in newspapers trumpeting the importance of profitability correctly assess investor sentiment on stock exchanges.

Software 364

Software Revenue Metrics Sales 364

Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.

Data

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2022

Dear SaaStr: What Were Some of the Toughest Lessons You Learned About How to Build a Successful SaaS Business? Some of the toughest lessons I’ve learned … and continue to re-learn: Even very talented co-founders may leave. You need to also make sure they are 110% committed. Very mediocre VPs are often very good at talking the talk. Mediocre execs often talk the talk even better than the best up-and-coming ones.

Business 362

Business SaaS Marketing 362

The Daily Egg

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

After you’ve successfully set up an online store and started generating some sales, you’re still bound to have some shoppers leave your. The post 7 Examples of Abandoned Cart Email Templates appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Sales 363

Sales 363

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2022

So in theory, SMB SaaS is better than enterprise, at least 9 times out of 10: Deals close much faster. Customers don’t expect as much in terms of security, compliance, etc. Customers often can deploy on their own. There is often just 1 stakeholder to sell to. Often can avoid procurement, RFPs, and so many other headaches. Customers don’t expect you to build a feature before they buy.

SMB 363

SMB Churn Payment Services SaaS 363

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2022

I originally wrote this post way, way back in the first year of SaaStr and have updated it every 2 years or so, because it’s an important thing to think about as a founder. Especially now in 2022, when venture capital again is scarcer, and more expensive, and far harder to close than it was during the go-go times for SaaS of 2021 and late 2020.

Venture Capital 363

Venture Capital Acquisition Pricing Cloud 363

Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage

There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.

AI

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2022

So we’re in the 5th or so “SaaS crash” since I’ve been doing SaaS. This one is the worst, not because SaaS companies aren’t’ doing well. No, they are doing better than ever. Not because valuations are terrible. No, they are still decent, in absolute terms. No, this SaaS Crash is so tough on VCs and public market investors because the market was just so, so high for Cloud stocks from mid-2020 to late 2021: You can see above in the BVP Nasdaq Cloud Index that while these are still Great Times

Venture Capital 364

Venture Capital Cloud Startup SaaS 364

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 31, 2022

There are roughly 27m software developers in the world. Only about 18k of them , or 0.07%, work on crypto or web3 every month. Those 18,000 active engineers have created $2 trillion in market cap across the top 100 projects - $112m of value per person. With such massive potential impact, why are there so few engineers working on web3? Crypto is young.

Engineering 363

Engineering Outsourced Development Marketing Software Development 363

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

We’ve been doing the 5 Interesting Learnings at SaaStr for quite a while, looking at many of the public SaaS leaders and pulling out the top learnings for founders and SaaS execs. I think it would be interesting and helpful to pull out the Top 20 PLG / Self-Serve learnings from the series. If you read the list of learnings, you may well find a few to learn from.

Scale 363

Scale SMB SaaS Scaling 363

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2022

With the summer of Defi behind us and a new year for web3, I wondered which categories of web3 startups generate the most revenue. L1s or blockchains, the public databases that record transactions, dominate the revenue share across the top projects producing 78% of revenue. Exchanges place second. Right behind, NFT exchanges rank third. Defi Protocols, which include lending, perps, farming, and swaps, slot in fourth.

Payments 364

Payments Revenue Payment Solutions Blockchain 364

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AI

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Will year-end Series A and B valuations top or trail those of January? This question sits atop most founders' lips and boardroom agendas. The broad market sentiment is they will be lower. Public-market software valuations have withered more than 60% from their highs. Alarm about interest rates, QE ending, and geopolitical risk have swirled around public technology companies, kinking the valuation curve.

Finance 363

Finance Pricing Investment Startup 363

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

So now that we’ve been doing our 5 Interesting Learning series on public SaaS companies for a while, we can pull out a number of trends. Maybe the most jaw-dropping is just how fast the top SaaS and Cloud leaders grow … at $1 Billion in ARR. The average SaaS leader grows almost 60% (!) at $1B in ARR: Of course, not everyone is going to get to $1B in ARR :).

SaaS 362

SaaS Cloud Trends Revenue 362

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 31, 2022

How much money flows into crypto each month? There’s the headline figure $1.7T which is the aggregate market cap of crypto. But how about the volumes of US dollars being exchanged into crypto each month? Sometimes this is called fund flows. I’ve learned calculating this figure is tricky because there’s no centralized reporting for it.

Travel 362

Travel Marketing 362

SaaStr

MARCH 27, 2022

A ways back, a Naval post on Twitter had my reflecting on the top advice I’d give to my younger CEO self: I missed one of the key Top 10 points — I ran out of 240 characters on Twitter), but thought it might be worth breaking them down in more detail on SaaStr below: 1. Go Long. This can be hard. The first start-up I ever joined as an employee was quickly acquired for $200m, which became $1 billion (!

Sales Hiring 362

Sales Hiring Scale Venture Capital Startup 362

Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments

Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.

Payments

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 18, 2022

The public software sector is weathering the second deepest multiple contraction in the last decade. Only the 2016 reduction of 57% surpasses it. Public market investors are rotating out of high growth technology companies as the Fed’s policies of quantitative easing, asset purchases, and low rates abate. The question on every software founder’s mind today must be, how will this affect the private financing markets?

Marketing 362

Marketing Startup Finance Technology 362

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 17, 2022

The round extension is the most popular fundraising round today. You won’t find statistics detailing their rise in PitchBook or Crunchbase, but “reopening the last round” or “raising a round extension” precede pitches Startupland today. How does an extension impact a company’s cap table on average? Round dilution from VC dollars has been declining for the past decade.

Finance 360

Finance Startup 360

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2022

Startups create products. After product-market fit, product teams hew the product roadmap from a panoply of options to the features best aligned with the company’s plans. In much the same way, CEOs architect the organization that builds, markets, sells, and supports the product. When a business is ready to scale, a startup ought to develop an organizational roadmap.

Startup 361

Startup Acquisition Product Marketing Scaling 361

SaaStr

OCTOBER 18, 2022

There are so many metrics out there these days on how public SaaS companies are doing. Versus last week, last month, etc. etc, So many metric sometimes it’s a little hard to get a handle on what they all mean. The latest Bessemer Parting the Cloud summarized it all I think with one helpful metric: SaaS multiples are down 75% from a year ago. .

SaaS 71

SaaS Cloud Metrics Pricing 71

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Payment Solutions

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2022

In Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy , I wrote about the importance of sizing contracts below customer needs to ensure customer success. “A key part of the formula: crafting the right account executive compensation structure to reward this strategy.” I received a pile of questions asking for more detail. Since then, I’ve spoken to many sales leaders & Lee Kirkpatrick who originally surfaced the concept during Office Hours on how to do this well.

Compensation 359

Compensation Sales Customer Success Retention 359

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

A lot of folks are talking about how things were in ’08-’09 and even ’00-’01 these days. I don’t think today is anything like those times. The amount of folks buying SaaS software is a force like we’ve never seen before, and even with some stock market drama, many top SaaS companies still trade at $4B, $10B, $20B or more just a decade after being founded.

SMB 359

SMB SaaS Churn Enterprise 359

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2022

Dear SaaStr: What Are Some Lies Founders Tell Themselves? #1 Lie. That it will get easier. It never gets easy, but it can get less difficult: You get better. You constantly learn, and in not that long of a time, become one of the experts in your space. At some point, you stop being at risk of going bankrupt. This does let you breathe. At some point, you have a brand, and that makes your growth more predictable.

Startup 357

Startup Branding Management Leadership 357